“The Knife,” originally published in The New Yorker (March 16, 1940), is described by John Updike as “a desolating sketch of faith’s clash with reality.” Themes familiar in Gill’s fiction and derived from personal experience motivate this story: namely, coping with the untimely death of a young mother and the role of Catholicism in that process.
The Knife
by Brendan Gill
Michael threw himself down, locked his hands over one of his father’s knees, and began, in a whisper, ” ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, kingdom come, will be done, earth as it is in heaven, give us this day—’ ”
Carroll folded his newspaper. Michael should have been in bed an hour ago. “Take it easy, boy,” he said. “Let’s try it again, slow.”
Michael repeated, slowly and distinctly, “‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed . . .’ ” Carroll saw that the boy’s pajamas were dirty at the cuffs; probably he had not brushed his teeth. ” ‘. . . as we forgive them, who trespass against us’-what does ‘trespass’ mean?”
“Why, hurting anybody.”
“Do I trespass anybody?”
“Not much, I guess. Finish it up.”
Michael drew a breath. “‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.'”
“Now,” his father said, combing back Michael’s tangled hair with his fingers, “what about a good ‘Hail, Mary’?”
“All right,” Michael said. “Hail, Mary” was easy. ” ‘Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’ ” Michael lifted his head with the intention of asking if a womb got fruit like a tree, but thought better of it. His father never answered questions seriously, the way his mother used to. He decided to wait and ask Mrs. Nolan, who was his best friend. “Is Mrs. Nolan coming tomorrow?” he asked.
“She’ll be here, all right. I give you ten seconds to finish that prayer.”
Michael was delighted by the ultimatum. “I thought you wanted me to go slow. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.’ ” He unlocked his hands. “Will she?”
Carroll’s attention had wandered. “Will she what?”
“Will she now and at the hour of our death, A-men?”
The words of the prayer were so familiar that Carroll had long since stopped thinking of their meaning. He repeated the prayer to himself. “Pray for us sinners”—the things children were made to say! It was hard to imagine Michael as a sinner. He said, “Yes, boy, she will.” He set his pipe in a broken dish on the table beside him. He had not emptied the dish of ashes in two days. Mrs. Nolan would give him a piece of her mind tomorrow morning, as she did each week when she came in to give the apartment a general cleaning and to do the laundry.
“What good can she do?”
“Climb into bed, young ragamuffin. It’s past nine.”
“What good can she do?”
“She’ll help you get anything you want. I suppose she’ll help you shinny up into heaven when the time comes. You know all about heaven, don’t you?”
Michael felt that he had been placed on the defensive. “Of course.”
“Well, then, get along with you.”
But Michael had something difficult to reason out. “You mean she’ll ask God for anything I want and He’ll give it to her for me?”
“She’s His Mother.”
Michael scrambled up and kissed his father on both cheeks. Then he marched from the room, and Carroll could hear his bare feet crossing the hall. The little bed creaked as he lay down in it. Carroll opened the newspaper, read a paragraph or two, and dropped it in a white heap on the rug. He felt tired and was grateful to feel tired; perhaps tonight he would be able to get some sleep. He stood up, slipped his suspenders from his shoulders, unknotted his tie, and kicked off his shoes. He had learned to undress quickly in the six months since his wife had died.
His pajamas were hanging inside out on a hook in the bathroom, where he had left them that morning. It was one of the things he had not yet got used to—that what he had left in a certain condition in the morning would be found in the same condition that night. When he had undressed and was standing at the sink, he felt Michael’s toothbrush with his thumb; the brush was dry. He should have explained to the child—for what? the twentieth time?—what happened to a person’s teeth when he forgot to brush them every night and morning.
Carroll stared at his face in the mirror above the sink.
He tried smiling. Nobody could tell what a man was thinking by the way he smiled. Even Michael, who was as good as a puppy at sensing moods, could not tell. He entered the dark bedroom on tiptoe. Feeling the sheets bunched at the foot of the mattress, he remembered that he had made the beds in a hurry. The sheets felt fresh and cool only on Saturdays, when Mrs. Nolan changed them.
Michael was not yet asleep. “Dad?”
“Go to sleep.”
He had moved Michael’s bed into his bedroom for the sake of convenience—when the boy had a bad dream at night, it was easier to reach out and shake him gently into comfort than to get up and pad in darkness down the hall to him—but the convenience was sometimes also a nuisance. He had never been good with the boy at night.
“I been asking Hail Mary for something.”
“Tomorrow.”
“No, I been asking her right now.”
Carroll lay on his back with his hands over his eyes, trying to make the darkness deeper, like a weight on him. “What’ve you been asking for, Mickey?”
Michael hesitated. “I thought I’d better make it something easy first. To see what happened.” He sat bolt upright in bed. “A jackknife.”
A few blocks away the clock in the tower of the city hall was striking ten. Michael was deep in the noisy middle of a dream. He was as strenuous and determined asleep as he was awake. Carroll listened to his breathing, then tried matching his own breath to Michael’s, as a device for making sleep come. No use. It was never any use. Every night Carroll pretended to himself that he was just at the brink of falling off to sleep, but his eyes always widened with wakefulness at the effort. Now, as the clock stopped striking, Carroll got up and walked into the bathroom and dressed. Then he went into the living room, tapped the bar of the lock on the front door sideways and up into its little metal loop, let himself out, heard the bar fall back in place, locked the door of the apartment, and walked down the two flights of stairs into the street. It frightened him to leave Michael alone, but it was unbearable to remain in the apartment awake. He had explained that he might sometimes go out for a few minutes, leaving Michael in charge. Michael wasn’t to be startled if he woke and found the bed beside him empty. Proud to be made temporary master of the house, Michael promised he never would be. There were times when Carroll, having left the apartment and started out on a walk, would imagine Michael suddenly screaming himself awake out of some dreadful nightmare, with nobody there to hold him tight; or worse—for once one began to think of horrors, they were quick to multiply—he would imagine the apartment building afire and Michael half suffocated by smoke and crying out for him in vain behind the locked door. And then, sweat starting rankly all over his body, Carroll would run home in panic, faster, faster, faster, to the sleeping child.
Shops reached out of sight along both sides of the avenue. Carroll walked uptown, as he always did. He stopped in front of each bright shopwindow, studying its contents for the fifth or sixth time. He knew by now the day when each window display was changed and by whom. Certain plastic models, certain fringed crepe papers had become old friends. There were bargains that nobody ever bought, so they could not, after all, be bargains. Prices slashed would again be slashed, and the unwanted things remained. At the top of a long slope, Carroll waited for the lights to change. On his left was a bar; on his right, across the street, a drug store. Between the slats of the orange Venetian blinds of the bar, he could see its broad mahogany counter, the stacked bottles lit from below and doubled in number by the mirrored wall behind them, and the barman polishing a glass between orders. A man and a girl were seated at a table by the window, scarcely a foot from Carroll’s eyes. Neither of them seemed to be speaking; no need to speak. The girl wore a black dress, open at the throat, and her skin was milky. The man’s hands lay halfway across the table; in one hand smoldered a cigarette. The girl reached out and took the cigarette and placed it in an ashtray, then gripped both the man’s hands in hers and drew them slowly toward her, and she was smiling.
Carroll turned quickly away from the bar and crossed the street to the drugstore. The owner, Sam Landsman, stood sniffing the night air under the red-and-white sign bearing his name, or part of his name: TRUST UNCLE SAM.
“Well, Mr. Carroll, nice night for March.”
Carroll needed to hear a voice, any voice. “How’s business?” he asked.
“Can’t complain,” Landsman said, then shook his head. “I got to break myself of that ‘Can’t complain.’ I got to remember, a serious subject. Business is lousy.”
Carroll leaned back against Sam’s window, which was crammed with hot-water bottles, perfumes, toys, and two brightly colored cardboard girls wearing shorts and sandals. The girls had been there for two months. There was dust on their teeth and on their smooth brown legs. “You ought to clean those girls’ teeth, Sam,” Carroll said, “and run your hand up and down their legs from time to time.”
“You walk a lot,” Sam said. “I figure on you, ten or eleven, most nights.”
“I guess I do.”
Sam slapped his belly, which was round and apparently as hard as stone. “Nothing like exercise, keep a man in shape.”
Carroll nodded impatiently. It turned out, as it always turned out, that it was not a matter of any voice. “Let me have a milk shake, Sam.”
They walked into the store. Carroll sat down on one of the stools at the fountain and watched Sam pouring milk into the shaker. Sam said, ” ‘Take out the fountain,’ my accountant says. ‘You’re losing your shirt on the fountain.’ I like a fountain, I tell him. What’s a drugstore without a fountain, right?” The hands of the electric clock above the door were at ten-forty-five. Carroll could not go to bed before twelve. He swung back and forth on the stool, studying the glass showcases at either end of the fountain. “Sell any jackknives, Sam?”
“Listen, me, I sell everything. Nothing like keeping a thing in stock to kill demand.” He poured out the milk shake in front of Carroll, then brought a tray of jackknives from somewhere at the rear of the store. “A nice selection,” Sam said. “Beauties. A dollar up.”
As he drank the shake, Carroll fingered one or another of the knives. He chose one at last. “Such expensive tastes!” Sam said. “That’ll be two bucks fifty, plus tax.”
Carroll paid for the knife and milk shake and walked out into the street. In another hour and a half he would have been able to walk six miles. By that time his body would be tired enough so he could sleep. By that time, he hoped, no voice could rouse him.
When Carroll woke, it was morning. He lay staring straight up, listening to the sound of the March rain against the windows. April showers might bring you May flowers, but March rains brought you nothing; they were ice-cold and they shut you in your room without any hope of escape.
Michael and Mrs. Nolan were talking together in the kitchen. Michael’s voice was high with excitement. “Look at it, Mrs. Nolan! Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It is that,” said Mrs. Nolan. Carroll raised himself on one elbow. It was too late to give her warning.
“Under my pillow,” Michael said, and then, “Do you ask for things when you say your prayers?”
“I do, now.” A pan clattered to the floor. “I’ve seen many a nice clean sty I’d swap for this dirty kitchen,” Mrs. Nolan said. “You live like a couple of savages from week to week. God love you.”
“You always get what you ask for?”
“It all depends. I sort of try to guess what the good Lord wants to give me, then ask for that.”
“That’s how I got this knife,” Michael said. “It’s got a big blade and a little blade and a screwdriver and a thing to punch holes in leather with and a file.”
“You must have said yourself the grand prayer,” said Mrs. Nolan. There was no hint of surprise in her voice.
“It was only a ‘Hail, Mary,’ but I did it slow, the way Dad told me to.” Michael was silent for a moment; a knife blade clicked shut. “I’m asking for the real thing tonight. The knife was just to see. Someone’s going to be here when you come next week.”
Mrs. Nolan made a clucking sound. “Someone instead of me?”
“She was here with Dad and me before you came,” Michael said, his voice thin with its burden, “and she’s coming back.”
“Michael!” Carroll called.
Michael ran to the bedroom doorway. The knife gleamed in his fist. “Look what I was showing Mrs. Nolan.”
“Come here, boy,” Carroll said. When Michael reached the edge of the bed, Carroll bent over and fastened his arms behind the child’s back. There was only one thing to say, and one way to say it, and that was fast. “I’m glad you like it,” he said. “I bought it for you last night at Uncle Sam’s. The biggest and shiniest one he had.”